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This article needs to include a relativistic treatment using differential forms as well. Phys 19:21, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
This article, dealing with a more than 100-year old topic, is mostly original research. The interpretation is certainly novel, and rests on at least one false assertion: The article states that a vector field which has the same direction at every point must have zero divergence. Also, the calculation of curl curl A in the example is wrong. The whole thing should be rewritten from scratch. Brian Tvedt 01:25, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
The article has been rewritten by Oleg Alexandrov and is much better now. Brian Tvedt 11:15, 18 August 2005 (UTC)
It would be nice if at least the SI unit of the vector potential was given somewhere.
I'd love it if somebody could add a bit on what the heck use it is. My experience so far involves a physicist who always worked with A. I was running physical experiments on the device he had derived a theory for. He insisted the device would have "no magnetic field". I whipped out the gaussmeter and measured the magnetic field. He would not accept the readings, as he considered the B field an illusion. Yet he was unable to direct me to an instrument that could measure vector potential, and could not convert A to B due to the pesky gauge factor problem. Tomligon ( talk) 22:57, 1 February 2009 (UTC)
(copied from above)
Hold on. It is a fact that _any_ smooth vector field defined on all of R^3 which has divergence 0, is the curl of another vector field, is it not? This is the Poincare Lemma. It does not require any assumptions on decaying at infinity! It is only the given formula that would fail to work if we didn't have some nice decay property.
Anyway, the first and primary thing the article should say is, having divergence = 0 and domain all of R^3 is sufficient. I'll start changing it soon, if nobody has any objections. Kier07 ( talk) 15:07, 8 August 2012 (UTC)
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 13 February 2023 and 12 June 2023. Further details are available
on the course page. Peer reviewers:
JiachengGeng,
Peytonpjccooney.
— Assignment last updated by Lzepeda12 ( talk) 21:07, 26 April 2023 (UTC)